Transient Students A Problem For Schools Pupils On The Move Challenge Central

Lisbeth Acosta pulls her school clothes out of a cardboard box in the morning. Stacked high in the bedroom and end-to-end in the hall, boxes abound in the two-room apartment where the 8-year-old's family has lived since summer. There's no point in unpacking, Lisbeth expects to move to her seventh home next summer.

New schools are old hat to the third-grader who's been through four of them ... and counting.

Accustomed to being the new kid on the block, Lisbeth fell into the routine at Central Elementary School in Allentown this year. Two months into the school year, she was unaware that Central started year-round schooling in August.

No matter. Lisbeth knows her stay at Central is temporary. Her family plans a move to Orlando, Fla., by the time she starts fourth grade.

Lisbeth is a transient student, like 66 percent of the other students who attended Central last year. Principal Christopher Yeager said that means two-thirds of the students who were in the school during standardized testing last March were not there during similar testing a year earlier.

Central's transiency rate greatly exceeded the district average of 27.3 percent in the 1996-97 school year.

District officials launched year-round education at Central partly to combat transiency -- a common problem that has plagued Allentown and other city school systems across the country for years.

With its shorter breaks and extra programs that reinforce what children learn in class, year-round education has cut transiency in at least one New Jersey school district.

At Joyce Kilmer Elementary School in Trenton, N.J., which shifted two-thirds of its students to a year-round schedule two years ago, about 10 percent of year-round students leave each year compared to 57 percent before the conversion, said Kilmer Principal John Goulding.

So far, the year-round calendar, launched on Aug. 25, has not had an impact on transiency at Central.

Withdrawals from the school, about 13 percent at the end of the first marking period Oct. 31, are about the same as last year.

While 99 students left, more than 100 newcomers arrived at the 750-student school.

Year-round education, with its extended schedule and increased opportunities for enrichment and remediation, offers parents a reason to keep their children at Central. But it doesn't get at the core of transiency, Yeager noted.

"There's not really anything else you can do. If they need to move and get out, it's something beyond our control," Yeager said.

Martha Acosta, Lisbeth's mother, said she had to move to the Dominican Republic last winter after she lost the factory job she had for 3-1/2 years. She took Lisbeth out of second grade at Cleveland Elementary and left.

Six months later, they were back in Allentown, living with Acosta's mother. Acosta said she decided to return because her mother was lonely.

Her mother will go with them when they move to Florida at the end of the school year in July, she said.

Orlando sounded good to Lisbeth on a cold December Friday. Shivering in winter coat and hat, the 8-year-old with coal-black hair and eyes to match shuffled her feet and waited for her mother to pick her up after school.

She knew she was moving before she started at Central, months after she returned from second grade in the Dominican Republic. She spent first grade at Allentown's Cleveland Elementary and kindergarten at Jefferson Elementary. Although she prefers to live in Allentown, Lisbeth is resigned to the move.

"My cousins and me, we like it here," she said, noting that her mother and uncle want to move. "They have a problem, but I don't know why. They say we have to move and we have to listen to them."

Allentown's winters are too hard for Acosta, an asthmatic who was raised in the warmth of Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic. The family doesn't fit in here, she said.

"We are different to other people," she said. "I don't speak good English. I have trouble finding a job."

That's why she and her extended family are heading for Florida's palm trees. Acosta, 32, hopes a friend can hook her up with a cleaning job there. She's unemployed after stints at custodial work, waitressing and the factory job. Acosta's goal is to make enough money to buy a car that will take her, her 59-year-old mother and Lisbeth to Florida.

The three live together in a cramped two-room apartment that overlooks Lehigh County Prison. They take their meals in a kitchen barely big enough for the table and three chairs that have been stuffed into it.

In the bedroom, Lisbeth plays school daily with stuffed animals as her pupils. She and her mother share a bed. Her grandmother, Anna Urena, sleeps on a mattress on the floor after a full day of cleaning rooms at a local hotel. The mattress doubles as a trampoline for Lisbeth, whose boundless energy tests its flat springs.

A fancy hair band of beads and baby's breath hangs on a mirror flanked by bare walls. Made at the seamstress shop downstairs, it's a memento of Lisbeth's role in her cousin's sweet 15 formal last year.